Factory Basics: How to Build Your T-Doll Skynet Army

This is where you’ll be constructing most of your dolls, equipment and fairies.

Note that Contracts and Quick Productions are slow resources to acquire, and outside of your daily recommended productions should generally be saved for Rate-ups to ensure optimal use.

With 3.0 the daily quest system has been overhauled and you no longer need to craft 4 dolls and 4 equipment a day. 

Regardless of these changes, new players should still do 4 doll crafts and 4 equipment crafts a day until they have the essentials.

Once you have your relevant HGs and possibly a few more RFs this can be toned down to 2 doll productions a day to save more resources for additional fairy crafts, or it can be kept at 4 doll crafts a day to increase your overall collection if that is preferred.

Equipment production should stay at 4 per day to ensure all IOP specials are used for the week and allow for a steady income of gold equipment.

It is recommended to do at least 4 fairy crafts per day for a steady and timely progression, if you do your logistics well and can afford more: do more for faster progress.

Recipes are listed in order of Manpower, Ammo, Rations, Parts. As such a 400/91/400/30 recipe would be 400 mp, 91 ammo, 400 rats and 30 parts.

Equipment and Fairy Recipes

As of 3.0 Mica has changed how Equipment crafting recipes function on the back-end. As a result you should only use in game recommended recipes, Mica changed the rates so that any voodoo recipe that deviates from those has lower rates

Heavy Doll Production

Should only ever be used to craft SGs with the 8000/1000/8000/4000 recipe. 

Far too expensive for new players.

Basic Doll Production

Here is where you’ll be getting your construction dolls. Over time there have been a lot of dolls added to construction and attempting to get specific dolls is something that should be expected to take time.

Standard recipes for dolls:

• 400/91/400/30 standard RF recipe
• 91/400/400/30 standard AR recipe
• 400/400/91/30 standard SMG recipe
• 130/130/130/30 standard HG recipe
• 800/800/100/400 standard MG recipe

Do note that you do not need MGs early on and that most of the strong ones are not from construction, leave MG crafting for later.

Anchors are a pity system for production, added with 2.09 for new production dolls as well as a special New Player Anchor that any player gets after logging in. The hard pity count depends on the production type (heavy or normal) as well as the rarity of the doll.

Taking in mind which units you get for free and which units you will need, it is highly recommended that your two New Player Anchor targets are Grape (Carcano M91/38) and Suomi, where Grape can be fitted into your first RFHG, while Suomi should be kept in reserve until you can mod her.

Grape is not especially amazing for the early game but is one of the best units as you progress past chapter 10 where she can eliminate big threats in one hit with her skill. It is highly recommended that you pick her up as she is extremely hard to craft and makes a lot of fights ch10 onwards way easier and her performance earlier on doesn’t hold the player back.

While Suomi doesn’t offer any immediate power, her Neural Upgrade is simply one of the absolutely strongest upgrades in the game and she can be used in almost any team where evasion tanking or shield tanking is viable. Picking her up early and ensuring that you have her available for when you gain access to Neural Upgrades would also enable you to no longer need to pull for any SMGs until quite a while later.

For a further rundown of Newbie Anchor dolls consider the following:

• Any HG should not be considered, even if some of these are rare as you will be pulling for more HGs anyway, and they are exceptionally cheap compared to everyone else. 
• Any MG should not be considered as none of the strong MGs are available here. In addition MGs are not used outside niche Armor stacking situations and you will not be using these for quite a while.
• Most SMGs should not be considered as killing stuff fast is far more important than tanking.
• ARs have 3 potential targets being 416, AK-15 and G11. As 416 is going to be one of your first mods, picking her and not needing to pull more for ARs super early on is a good idea.
• RFs have a few useful targets, Grape is a very easy to use and strong early option.

If for whatever reason you already have these or want to pick some other strong options;

• AK-15 whose Neural Upgrade is exceptionally strong and she is a good choice.
• Kar98k whose Neural Upgrade (attached to the Longitudinal Strain major event) is extremely strong, giving her multipliers equaling Grape but also works against Elites.

Take note that these alternative options are only really good when they have their Neural Upgrade, and modding 5☆ dolls requires FCCs which are somewhat limited by time, and the only early availability is from old Campaigns.

Enhancing and linking your dolls is crucial to ensure they can perform well in combat.

Dummy Linking

Dolls generally come unlinked and you must feed them cores or duplicates to link them up. Each link is essentially another copy of the doll on the field that will attack simultaneously, which effectively multiplies your health and damage output. For example, a 2-linked doll will have twice the health and damage of a 1-linked doll.

Dolls can gain an additional link at levels 10, 30, 70 and 90 maxing out at 5-link there.

Linking can be done either with a duplicate of the doll or using cores. The cost of linking a doll is tied to their rarity and link count. The first two additional links only require 1 duplicate each while the last two require 2 duplicates and 3 duplicates respectively. Cores may be used as a substitute for duplicate dolls with the cost being based on the rarity of the doll multiplied by the amount of duplicates for the specific link increase:

• 2☆ dolls cost 1 core per duplicate missing
• 3☆ dolls cost 3 cores per duplicate missing
• 4☆ dolls cost 9 cores per duplicate missing
• 5☆ dolls cost 15 cores per duplicate missing

Farming cores is generally far easier than farming duplicates of a doll, as such using cores farmed through Corpse Dragging to link dolls is the standard.

Enhancement

While dolls gain their health increase directly as they level up, they do not gain other stats automatically and must be enhanced in the factory menu to gain the full benefits from leveling up. For SGs specifically they also gain armor as they level, not needing to be enhanced for this.

Enhancement Pills grant a full 1 of each stat per pill, allowing you to swiftly max out a doll. Should a stat reach its cap, part of the wasted stats will be added to other stats as you add more pills.

Using 2☆ dolls is mostly just auto-filling with the Smart Select button. This will automatically attempt to fill in whatever 2☆ dolls you have to improve the stats of a doll.

Enhancement Pills are obtained through the monthly allotment in the Black Market in Forward Base or through doing your weekly ticket collection and rolling for the gacha in Luffberry Chess. Major events’ Boxes are also a very lucrative source of pills, often giving enough to no longer need to buy them from Black Market.

This is primarily used to craft SGs and has an excessive cost compared to normal doll productions. You should never use Heavy Doll Production for anything other than SGs.

As a newer player, SGs and MGs are excessively expensive to field. While before chapter 6 it might seem easy to out-armor enemies and take almost no damage, keeping up with enemy damage increases becomes swiftly non-viable as enemy FP skyrockets and enemies with AP are introduced. SGs are a tech option that sees more use far far later, but as a newer player they are a resource trap that can severely hinder your progress.

In addition to all this, most of the powerful SGs are far more easily available through Core Masking or gained through career quests such as with M500 (note that she’s not good on her own and requires modding to be good, see her mod page for more info).

The official recipe of 8000/1000/8000/4000 is for once correct, and is the only recipe you should be using. Higher tiers are generally not recommended both due to excessive Contract and Core costs as well as because this lowers the 3☆ SG rates and one of the strongest SG mods is a 3☆.

As you play the game you will be collecting a whole pile of 2☆ and higher dolls that you do not need. Any that are 3☆ or higher that you do not intend to raise (and thus using dupes to link them) should be scrapped for cores, as this is the main source of cores in the game.

The core gain is related to how many cores a single doll is worth as a dupe for dummy linking divided by 3 as follows:

• 3☆ dolls give 1 core when scrapped.
• 4☆ dolls give 3 cores when scrapped.
• 5☆ dolls give 5 cores when scrapped.

As cores are needed for linking dolls, modding dolls and crafting fairies you will end up needing a lot of them, which is where Corpse Dragging comes into the picture, allowing for cheap exp and core farming. See the Corpse Dragging page for more info.

If you are worried about collection or possibly needing a doll later, don’t be. GFL has a retrieval function tied to the Index allowing you to recover any doll you have previously collected but have no copies of currently once per week, refreshing with the weekly reset. As such if you do end up scrapping a strong doll or a doll that gains a mod you can just retrieve her later. Recovering a doll costs 1 dummy link worth of cores, so up to 15 cores for a 5☆ and much less for lower rarity dolls.

For a reference on whether something is worth keeping or not see the Doll Analytics spreadsheet. Anything that isn’t at least ‘optional/niche’ is likely best used through scrapping them for cores.

There used to be Heavy Equipment Production which was how fairies used to be available. Heavy Equipment Production is currently not available as there is no use for it due to Fairy Crafting now having its own dedicated menu.

IOP Specials

IOP Specials are Special Orders that are guaranteed to be the type of equipment you are selecting, with no other equipment types diluting the pool. You get 20 of these per week plus a chunk of bonus tickets from Career Quests that can be saved for a General Rate-up. 

To use these you must click the IOP Special button and then select one of the recipes, after which you can batch produce as usual. You should always aim to have spent all your IOP Special tickets each week as these are vastly superior to pulling normally for basically any equipment type.

The Specified Equipment Contracts are IOP Special tickets that can be used beyond your weekly limit of 20. It is highly recommended to save these for a General Rate-up (happens 3 times a year, see the Events page for more details) as you would gain the most out of them during these.

Additional Specified Equipment Contracts are very sparse with only being occasionally purchasable in Kalina’s Shop.

What Equipment to pull for early on

Aim to have the following 5☆ equipment: 1 Armor Plate, 3-5 Crit scopes, 1-3 EOTs, 2-3 #2 chips, 3 HV ammo and 1-2 gold AP ammo. After this is achieved you should aim to fully equip all the offensive dolls you are fielding at once.

As corpse dragging 0-2 is usually required to reach Commander level 60 and enabling dragging on later maps, getting your first gold Armor first is highly recommended as it is required to do this efficiently.

7-day login gives you 1 gold crit scope, 1 gold HV ammo and 1 gold PEQ. Career quests for 3-4n gives you a green and a gold AP, which should be sufficient for your first RFHG until you start building a second one later on.

With the arrival of 3.0 fairy crafting is now in its own dedicated tab, guaranteeing a fairy each craft as opposed to the RNG hell of Heavy Equipment Production that existed before.

Fairies are extremely important to keep crafting as you need a LOT of fairies to get them raised to 5☆. More on fairies and how they work in the Fairy section.

You should aim to do daily sets of Fairy crafts similar to Equipment and Doll Production. The recommended recipe is 500x4 for all your normal fairies; keep doing this until the important ones (or all of them) are 5☆. 

So with new fairy crafting Mica decided to overhaul the way recipes are weighted and the good old reliable recipes are now no longer the best

• 500x4, cheapest investment.
• 3k/500/2k/1.5k, recipe for Reinforcement type fairies, includes Parachute.
• 500/2k/3k/1.5k, recipe for Combat type fairies.

Note that it is highly recommended not to do expensive fairy pulls early on as the fairies from 500x4 are often better than most of the more expensive fairies for regular combat, and you are given a Parachute for free from Career Quests.

If you end up crafting additional Parachute Fairies, keep them if you intend to dupe. Parachute Fairy is the single most powerful fairy in the game at the time of writing.

Note that the old recommended recipes no longer function properly: The old pre-3.0 recommended recipes that were the go-to have been completely ruined by whatever Mica did to the back end. DO NOT USE THEM! 

The only recipes you should be using are the three listed above.

Coalition units have their own Enhancement and Dummy-Linking systems called Development and Analysis respectively. They function similarly to the doll systems but with some differences.

Development

As opposed to dolls, Coalition units do not gain stat potential as they level and instead are able to develop to the next star rating as they reach higher levels. Note that Coalition units gain stats directly as they level based on their current rarity as opposed to regular dolls that need to be enhanced.

Developing Coalition units costs Petri Dishes gained through Coalition Drills or buying them in the Exchange Store, the cost scales with the initial rarity and star rating you are upgrading the unit to, the higher the initial rarity the more expensive each upgrade is though you require less of them total.

For more info see the Coalition basics page.

Analysis

Instead of dummy linking, Coalition units have Analysis which functions similarly for most of the units but only ever requires 1 copy per Petal. For units that do not have dummy links like Manticores and Goliath Factories the unit instead gains stats as they are Analyzed.

There is also no substitute for duplicates for Coalition units like there is for dolls, you cannot simply use cores to fully link them but instead requires a total of 5 copies to fully Analyze one unit.

Ringleaders gain skill and tile improvements in place of stat improvements for some of the Analysis Levels as they are Analyzed.